Generally, a robot has been developed for an industrial use, and has managed some parts of factory automation. As the robot is applied to various fields recently, medical robots, space robots, home robots used at homes, etc. are being developed.
A representative of the home robots is a robot cleaner, a kind of home electronic appliance capable of performing a cleaning operation by sucking peripheral dust particles or foreign materials with autonomously moving on a predetermined region. This robot cleaner is provided with a rechargeable battery, and is provided with an obstacle sensor for avoiding an obstacle while moving.
In order to clean a whole area while moving by itself, the robot cleaner should generate a map for cleaning and determine clean areas, such as a cleaned area and an area to be cleaned, within the generated map for cleaning.
The robot cleaner should carry out a process of generating a travel path to avoid an obstacle and take the shortest distance while traveling within a space to be cleaned. Here, the robot cleaner according to the related art spends a longer time to calculate a full travel path or the shortest distance when the space to be cleaned increases (extends). Also, to calculate the full path and the shortest distance, the robot cleaner should be aware of a map for cleaning with respect to the whole area to be cleaned. This makes the robot cleaner equipped with a memory of a large capacity for storing the map for cleaning the whole area to be cleaned.